A news story straight out of the ‘how to be casually and unhelpfully sexist’ PR textbook here, with the British male’s ‘manliness’ in question. And, by question, I mean of course held up against a ludicrous and worthless criteria in order to find men lacking.

What ought men today be able to do, to allow them to keep their ‘man card’ and prevent them having to ‘grow a pair’ and ‘man up’? Besides being able to light a fire without the aid of a lighter, there’s a raft of other necessities:

And commiserations if you’re stuck on a desert island with a man who can’t (or won’t) help chop, hunt and fish.

The assumption here, of course, being that no woman has any of those skills – that goes without saying. No, women correctly do not know how to hunt or fish, but men incorrectly lack these required man skills.

Whereas tools such as fishing rods and knives would be the first things to be chucked into a knapsack, 29% of men would rather rely on ready meals.

The word ‘rather’ being likely crucial in that sentence – personally, given the choice (as it appears men were, in an online poll) between hunting, gutting, skinning and cooking an animal, or eating a ready meal… I’m pretty sure I’d side with the ready meal.

Lazy lifestyles and office jobs requiring sitting at a desk for up to nine hours a day are being blamed on men’s dwindling ability to deal with practical tasks.

That’s right – men are just too lazy and office-bound to be out killing small animals and casually lighting fires. If they weren’t so bloody lazy, today’s men would all be meeting the fire-and-death quota specified on the back of their ‘man cards’.

Of course, this spurious and sexist poll is nothing more than an advert for an aggressively manly TV show:

Survival guru Bear Grylls, host of new TV show The Island, said: “What happens when you strip man of all the luxury and conveniences of modern living and then force them to fight for their very existence?”

I’d imagine what happens is a TV show watched by essentially nobody, Bear.

A screaming baby or a TV in a child’s room can lead to the parents’ divorce, claims new series

As any parents of a young child who is a problem sleeper will confirm, permanent tiredness and constant irritability can put a huge strain on your relationship. In fact, according to a survey, lack of sleep is a big factor in divorce and separation for a third of couples.

Ahead of a new series on the subject, a poll carried out for Channel 4 suggests the average parent surveyed got fewer than six hours of sleep a night. It also found that three in 10 couples who had split up said sleep deprivation since having their child was a factor in the breakup. Nearly 45% said they had dozed off in a place they shouldn’t have or was unsafe, with one in 20 admitting to falling asleep at the wheel of their car.

This particular story is a little thorny and a little tricky to unpick. For one, the Observer article (if not the Mail) makes it clear up front that this research came from the TV show ‘Bedtime Live’ – in fact it was release specifically to promote the show.

Another complication is the involvement of respected researcher Dr Tanya Byron, who appears to do robust work. Perhaps, then, this isn’t simply a case of spurious researched being used to prop up the advertising for a TV show? Perhaps this is legit?

You’d certainly be forgiven for thinking so, however I’m not sure things are so clear and above-board – for instance, note the quotes from Dr Byron supporting the findings:

‘I see people whose children have chronic sleep problems and they’ll say things like their children get really upset if they try to send them to bed.

‘Well, I promise you, they won’t hate you in the morning when they’ve had a proper rest.

‘Our generation struggles with discipline much more than any other, but the lack of boundaries will only cause more and more difficulties.

‘From a clinical perspective, a lot of those I see in my own clinics, predominantly children, have underlying issues with not getting enough sleep, even if that isn’t the problem they are presenting with.

As you’ll see, this says nothing at all about the headlien claim that researchers discovered how sleepless nights lead to divorce – this, clearly, is a quote from Dr Byron on her participation in the show.

Instead, the ‘research’ which uncovered this startling fact was an online poll conducted, I believe, via Bad PR regulars OnePoll – I certainly took part in a very similar survey on their site recently. If so, I’d consider the headline-grabbing statistic that marriages are ending over sleepless nights and crying babies to be highly suspicious.

What’s more, if I were Dr Byron, I might want to have a word with the show’s producers, to make sure future press releases made it very clear which claims came from the academic and which from the PR machine.

This would tell us something interesting and revealing about the appeal of a good, old-fashioned paper diary… were it not a press release for a new E4 TV show about diaries in a pre-internet age:

Dear Facebook, to know the REAL truth, read my diary

Research by E4 reveals personal pen-and-paper diaries more popular than ever as teens take comfort in private journals over social networking sites

Research conducted by E4 to tie in with brand new British 90’s-set series My Mad Fat Diary, based on the real-life teenage diaries of Rae Earl – starting Monday 14th January, 10pm

It’s a statistic Adrian Mole would be proud of: personal pen-and-paper diaries are more popular now than pre social-media days, as today’s teens take comfort in private journals as an outlet for their innermost thoughts and feelings, a survey by E4 has revealed.

The survey – undertaken to coincide with the launch of My Mad Fat Diary, a new 90s-set British series based on the real-life teenage diaries of Rae Earl – reveals that 83% of today’s teenage girls keep a diary, compared with 69% in the 1990s.